The future of laser warfare may depend on hybrid trucks

This article is republished with permission from Laser Wars, a newsletter about military laser weapons and other futuristic defense technology. The U.S. military is closing in on its high-energy laser weapon of choice for counter-drone missions. Now it needs the vehicles to support it. With the demise of its Stryker-based Directed Energy-Maneuver Short-Range Air Defense program, the U.S. Army has focused its ground-based laser weapon efforts on light tactical vehicles. AV’s 20-kilowatt LOCUST Laser Weapon System has already been operationally tested aboard both the infantry squad vehicle (ISV) and the joint light tactical vehicle (JLTV) through the Army Multi-Purpose High Energy Laser effort, establishing that the military’s preferred mobile platforms can carry and employ directed energy weapons in the field. The Army has reinforced this preference with its Enduring High Energy Laser push, which is explicitly targeting light tactical vehicles like the JLTV for what might become the U.S. military’s first directed energy program of record. Both the ISV and JLTV are at the center of the military’s emerging approach to future distributed operations. For the Army, the speedy and versatile ISV is seen as providing an essential maneuver capability for Mobile Brigade Combat Teams on a battlefield increasingly dominated by low-cost weaponized drones. And while the ultimate fate of the JLTV remains uncertain, the vehicle is currently the chosen platform for the Marine Corps air defense system that’s the backbone of the service’s new Marine Littoral Regiments. But both platforms face the same big problem: power. And the two services’ potential solutions offer a look at what the military’s future fleet of laser trucks might actually look like. As the modern battlefield is increasingly defined by unmanned systems and the electronics needed to counter them, consistent and reliable power at the tactical edge has become as important as ammunition. During the height of the Global Wa